Online education is clearly on the rise and with it many options for online homeschooling.

Online homeschooling can mean courses that are fully online with all instruction, review, projects and testing completed on the computer. It can also mean online instruction that correlates with a textbook or other learning guide. Other online homeschool options have a textbook or workbook at the core with enrichments available online.

The question is, what is it that homeschoolers really want in an online program?

Please post your comments below. If you are considering turning to an online homeschool option, what format would you prefer? And if you have used online homeschooling for your children, what do you see as its advantages and disadvantages?

I have used a number of different types of online courses, and the ones I liked best had a high degree of interaction between students and teacher. At the very minimum, you need a web forum and everyone commenting on everyone else's work, and there are some subjects where it's good to go one step further and have regular chats (IRC chat, IM chat, web chat, whatever). What you don't want is a course where you basically just turn in assignments online and get them graded two weeks later - might as well be signed up for a correspondence course for all the good it does you.

As for curriculum - I prefer having a textbook and/or other core materials that I can reference offline, but assignments, supplementary links / movie clips, etc. are good to have online. Needless to say, assignments should also be submitted online and graded promptly. More than a few days of delay is too much.

MIT and a whole bunch of other major colleges (dozens by now) are opening up free online course programs, good ones. Won't help you much with elementary, but once you get to high school and college that may be an option.

We used Time4Learning for over four years. It is totally online. The programs for the lower level kids are very interactive. They become more independent as you get further into the upper level (6-8th grades).

The site does all the record keeping, which you can download, print, or use in a portfolio. The student has access to three grade levels within each subject. This was good for us because my daughter was ahead in language and behind in math. For example, if you child is on grade level 5, they have access to grades 4, 5, and 6 for every subject. They offer art and algebra as a bonus.